pioneering artificial-intelligence program Hearsay II, whose very subtle
architecture started exerting, only a year or two after GEB came out, a vast
impact on my own computer models, and about which I already knew
something way back in 1976? Why not talk more about machine translation,
and especially its weaknesses? Why not have a whole chapter about the most
promising developments (and/or exaggerated claims) over the past two
decades in artificial intelligence - featuring my own research group as well
as others? Or why not, as some have suggested, come out with a CD-ROM
with Escher pictures and Bach music on it, as well as recordings of all of
GEB's dialogues as performed by top-notch actors?
Well, I can see the arguments for any of these, but unfortunately, I just
don't buy them. The CD-ROM suggestion, the one most often made to me,
is the simplest to dismiss. I intended GEB as a book, not as a multimedia
circus, and book it shall remain - end of story. As for the idea of revising
the text, however, that is more complex. Where would one draw the line?
What would be sacrosanct? What would survive, what would be tossed out?
Were I to take that task on, I might well wind up rewriting every single
sentence - and, let's not forget, reverse-engineering old Mr. T ...
Perhaps I'm just a crazy purist; perhaps I'm just a lazy lout; but stubborn
no doubt, and wouldn't dream of changing my book's Urtext. That's out!
Thus in my sternness, I won't allow myself to add the names of two people
- Donald Kennedy and Howard Edenberg - to my ''Words of Thanks",
despite the fact that for years, I've felt sad at having inadvertently left them
out. I won't even correct the book's typos (and, to my chagrin, I did find,
over the decades, that there are a few, aside from those listed explicitly
under "typos" in the index)! Why on earth am I such a stick-in-the-mud?
Why not bring Codel, Escher, Bach up to date and make it a book worthy of
ushering in the twenty-first century - indeed, the third millenium?
Qurerendo Invenietis ...Well, the only answer I can give, other than that life is short, is that GEB was
written in one sitting, so to speak. GEB was a clean and pure vision that was
dreamed by someone else - someone who, to be sure, was remarkably
similar to yours truly, but someone who nonetheless had a slightly different
perspective and a slightly different agenda. GEB was that person's labor of
love, and as such - at least so say I - it should not be touched.
Indeed, I somehow feel a strange inner confidence that the true author
of GEB, when one fine day he finally reaches my ripe age, will tender to me
the truest of thanks for not having tampered with the vessel into which he
poured so much of his young and eager soul - the work that he even went
so far as to call, in what some might see as a cryptic or even naively romantic
remark, "a statement of my religion". At least I know what he meant.
REQVIESCAT IN CONSTANTIA, ERGO,
REp&ESENTATIO CvPIDI AVCTORIS REUGIONIS.Twentieth-anniversary Preface P-23